


Make 'em Laugh

by PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid



Category: The Property of Hate, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Electrocution, Kinda, Mind Control, Typical Desert Bluffs Gore, Typical Desert Bluffs Violence, heavily implied child death, typical Negative RGB violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-15 06:28:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3436907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid/pseuds/PartiallyStars_MostlyVoid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>RGB's mission to Night Vale to find a child that's better at surviving the horrors of unreality was not successful. Luckily, there's an ever-so-friendly neighboring town some way along Route 800. Maybe he'll have better luck there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make 'em Laugh

_If you’ve completed your mandatory allotted work hours, come see what The Entertainer has to offer you! He dances, he jokes, he displays corporate approved pictures on his screen! Come one, come all, come laugh at The Entertainer until your sides are splitting! (self surgery repair kits available at the door on request)_

 

He’s heard people say that making people laugh is one of the most difficult things there is, but from his point of view it’s always been, if not a breeze, then a strong but workable wind. Everyone wants to laugh after all; it’s just a matter of pleasing the audience. If the crowd is a beast, then feed it. If it’s a machine, figure out which buttons to press. And the crowd here in Desert Bluffs seems to be ravenously omnivorous, and have pushable buttons aplenty. Quite literally, in some cases. But he doesn’t let that bother him. Why would he? He feeds the beast and works the machine, and steers his sinking ship onwards, propelled by gales of their laughter.

The performance hall in which he spends his working days is huge, and warm, and glistening. It’s arranged like an elongated theatre auditorium, rows of tiered seats falling away at a slight upward angle under a roof ridged with beams. At the far end, there’s a great curve of silvered glass panels that catch the yellowish light of the far off strip lights and smear it a little more evenly around the hall. The stage is regular hardwood, and often slippery, which makes for great slapstick. There’s the suggestion of a planned-then-overturned colour scheme in the drapes and the velvet; yellows and oranges, stripes and highlights, borders and shapes to create structure out of something organic. Mostly though, it’s just red. The colour creeps into the material of his trousers and glaring yellow blazer, cuffs and turn-ups stiff with it, smelling of pennies. It spots his shirt, stains his gloves. He’s assimilating. Dissolving.

The bank of mirrors grins down at him as he dances.

It’s a good life, all in all. He’s not sure how he knows this, not having anything to compare it too any longer, but the whisper of the company broadcast tell him that the life he has now is pretty much perfect. That coming to Desert Bluffs was the best choice he ever made. That he has value. Worth. And that feels… that feels pretty good. Excellent, in fact. There is comfort in being placed on a numerical scale, the broadcasts say, it’s nice to know exactly what your position is in the grand scheme of life. He makes people laugh. And he’s good at it. Much better than… whatever it was he used to do, although he’s no longer sure what that was, exactly. Probably nothing important, or the broadcasts would tell him. They tell him everything that’s important. No. Rephrase that. They tell him _what_ is important. Yes. Much better.

In spite of that… there’s still something bothering him. When he sleeps, his mind isn’t filled with the bright, empty nothing that all the helpful productivity leaflets assure him ought to be there. Instead, falling asleep is like pitching headfirst into a deep, endless pit. It’s dark, but not uniformly so- there’s a chaos of inky tendrils, fluctuating spirals that draw him in and reveal themselves to be nothing more than the place where he started. And all the while, a sense of being watched. Not in the normal way, by the unified gaze of the crowd, or the cameras on every street corner and coat button, but from inside, somehow. And when he wakes, it’s always in a panic, struggling to break the surface of a lake that isn’t there. There’s a moment, between the turbulence of sleep and the soothing assertion of the Strex broadcasts, where everything is so clear. His head above water, his mind sharp and whirring and utterly his own- he remembers, he remembers everything, how he got here, _why_ he got here, what he came for. Then the tendrils of the company broadcasts worm their way down his antennae and into his circuits, curling, hissing, cooing, reminding him of his duties to the town, to the company, smoothing away the memories and the cares like a cool hand on a fevered brow. And everything is okay again, apart from the sticky sensation of another night’s sleep lost to happenstance.

He’d shared his concerns with his supervisors at one time- that’s what they’re there for, after all. They’d smiled (of course, they were always smiling, but they’d smiled _wider_ ), and offered a very simple solution- they could make it so he didn’t have to sleep. They’d explained that it wouldn’t be any trouble, really- another branch of the company had already been looking into reducing the number of hours of sleep a human being needs through a combination of brain surgery, electro-shock therapy, and fear conditioning. But while they had managed to almost eradicate the need for sleep entirely, the lifespan of the test subjects- whoops, sorry, _valued employee_ s- was reduced by about half, sometimes more. Which effectively meant that the net increase in hours of productivity didn’t change from the average. But in his case, well- with his circuit board brain, oh-so-fixable in it’s constitution of wires and lights and diodes, they could do so much more than just eradicate sleep. They were sure.

He’d thanked them politely, saying that he’d think about it, and hadn’t let them see that the very idea of never sleeping again made him want to scream.

But was OK, in the end. He could get by with the restless nights, because they were always followed and preceded by wonderful, productive days. And when that isn’t enough- when the work seems unfulfilling, and the laughter rings raucous and hollow around the cavernous performance hall, he consoles himself with the fact that it could be worse. After all, none of the town’s residents dream. Not. A single. One. That’s something to be thankful for, at least.

So he dances and he jokes, and he serves up visceral delights on a silver screen. And he cannot think of a time when he has ever been happier.


End file.
